nanoomi

Today, October 20th, is the birthday of great Korean author Park Wan-suh, who passed away last year. The folks at Google are honoring her birthday by featuring her on the Google doodle on the Korean language and English language pages (The other languages are not doodled today and this only appears to show up for some IP addresses).

It features a young Park herself, holding the “singa” mentioned in the title of her best known (in English) work, Who Ate Up All the Singa? It looks like this:

Park Wan-suh is definitely worth checking out, which you can do here on KTLIT.

Waxen Wings: The Acta Korean Anthology of Short Fiction from Korea, edited by Bruce Fulton, is a  breakthrough in the translation and publishing of Korean short stories into English. It is the first collection of such stories that I have read in which it seemed that the criteria for choosing works included a simple analysis of whether or not the works would be enjoyable and comprehensible to Western readers who have little innate understanding of Korea or her culture.

The beauty of choosing such stories is that they will draw readers in and, with sugar and not medicine, introduce them to Korean culture in general. In fact, this volume is so easy to read that parsing it suggests that yet another step might be taken in translation, and that is to divide the “modern” era of Korean literature into thirds. This need is highlighted by the fact (and I NEVER thought I’d say this) that the book somewhat skips over the colonial and division periods, which I think is a good thing in total.

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I love Arirang. ^^

Last Thursday I had the pleasant experience to be on Arirang’s “Heart to Heart”  with Lee So-jung. We discussed a wide range of topics, including favorite authors (including the recently deceased Park Wan-suh), favorite books, marketing Korean literature, and the Wikipedia Project.

A 24-minute video of the entire thing reveals that I am reasonably glib, but need to get back into the gym!

You can see the video here. (this requires a relatively painless registration with the Arirang website)

Park Wan-so

Multiple Korean newspapers are noting the passing of brilliant Korean author Park Wan-so, who apparently died as the result of gallbladder cancer. Park had been battling the disease and her death leaves behind four daughters. Her literary career spanned thirty years, and she wrote more than 20 novels and 100 short stories.

Born in what is now a North Korean village in 1931, Park was a relatively late-bloomer as a published author, writing her first novel just before she turned 40. The housewife-turned-novelist when her long story Namok, or Bare Tree, won a contest organized by a female magazine run by the Donga daily newspaper. Park became the Grand Dame of Korean letters, and in 1981 received the prestigious Yi Sang award for her novel, Mother’s Stake, and in 1990 the Korean Literature award.

Park was forced to drop out of the Korean literature department at Seoul National University at the onset of the Korean war (and at the death of her brother) in order to work at a US military base (and the death of her brother). During the war, Park was separated from her mother and elder brother by the North Korea army, which moved them to North Korea.

Her ouvre quickly grew and her work is revered in Korea. Park’s early work focused on the tragedy of families separated………

Concluded at www.ktlit.com

NOTE: This article was published in a slightly different form in 10 Magazine

If you’ve worked your way through all of Stieg Larsson and the Twilight series is beginning to become predictable (Find neck, insert teeth. Repeat as necessary)? Then it’s time to delve into Korean literature. And there is no better time than now. As few as two decades ago, translated Korean Modern fiction was a dreary procession, tramping slowly but completely over the same dusty terrain: Colonialization, the Korean War;  traumas of the political war that followed, and; the social and economic price of industrialization. A western reader, picking these books up and glancing over them, could easily be forgiven for putting them down with a shudder, and taking up less troublesome affairs like grave-robbing or self-mutilation.

For Western readers without knowledge of Korean culture and history, anything published before 1980 might seem a bit archaic and/or opaque. Having spent the first half of last century under the boot of the Japanese colonialists, and the latter half engaged either in an active or passive civil war, Korean modern literature has tended to grimness; combining the light-hearted joi-de-vivre of black-and-white Holocaust documentaries with a pronounced fratricidal tone that the Khmer Rouge would have immediately embraced. Unless you are a fan of history, or uncontrollable weeping, this is the literature to look past.

But a new wave (Hello Hallyu!) of Korean writers (and a sprinkling of evergreen perennials) has put much of that in the past, either moving on to new topics, or melding old topics to themes and stories that English readers can read and enjoy.

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On my weekly tour of London Korean Links, I saw a couple of things that have specific application to Korean Modern Literature.

The first one is a review of The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost. LKL says:

Looks like an interesting new book about to hit UK bookshops on 29 September, from Columbia University Press: The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost by Kim Sok-pom

And reprints the publisher’s blurb so we can check it out. It’s an interesting looking book, and the cover is just great looking (which sounds like faint praise, but as a marketer I can tell you it’s not). I’ll come back to this one, once I’ve read it, because from the blurb it seems like a very interesting, very complicated book, that will be a very big failure to sell or do anything to advance Korean culture outside of Korea.

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